Tom Cheetham on the Effects, and Hope, of Materialism

In a world so conceived, nothing can be more real than anything else. In a world so conceived, consciousness is reducible to and explicable in terms of physical, biological, social and historical forces. Such a world is radically incompatible with the existence of persons. This is nihilism. As long as we feel alienated and exiled in such a world, there is hope. But the very real danger is that we will abandon ourselves to this world in our hopelessness, abandon oruselves to those impersonal forces which drive us blindly to our ends, and in doing so, we will disappear: There will no longer be persons.